Smart Grid

How do companies make it through gut-wrenching industry and technological change without going under?

I do my best to wish every TMC a team member a Happy TMC Anniversary and as such the start date of all of our full-time members are in my calendar so I can be the one to send them this greeting (If I forgot you in the past - please accept my apologies). Last week I noticed that it was the anniversary of Nadji Tehrani, the company Founder & Chairman, my father and the person who decided to start this company in 1972. Funny, I never noticed his start date on my calendar before - and it occurred to me that this was TMC's 38-year anniversary.

I have heard a number of positive comments regarding the addition of an optical event at ITEXPO this fall. Thanks for all your comments. As I mentioned recently, Lightwave ONE which stands for "Optical Networks for Enterprises" will be collocated with ITEXPO Oct 4-6 2010 in Los Angeles, CA.

As you likely know, we at TMC do our best to ensure we provide the most complete educational experience we can under one roof.

Smart health systems have the potential to transform healtchare and weight-loss in a similar manner to the way electronic spreadsheets transformed corporate analysis and boosted the bottom line

One of the largest shifts in technology which has silently grown in importance in the world of electronics and technology is that of the product ecosystem - the group of smart products which interact with one another to provide a collective solution much more powerful, adaptable and flexible than any particular component of the ecosystem.

If you haven't kept up with the Smart Product Ecosystem or SPEC site on TMCnet, please do as this is the best place I know of to keep up with the market and its evolution. There are some fascinating stories I just received in this week's SPEC enewsletter (subscribe) and I will focus on the first one as you are free to check out the others at your leisure.

The first story from Professor Mary Cronin discusses MetaLogics, a company that developed a sensor to determine accurate caloric expenditure.

It is no secret that I have been hearing great things about the future of the optical market. Check out this post for optimistic interviews regarding the space with Hunter Newby of Allied Fiber and Jim Theodoras of Adva Optical Networking. Between the need for faster enterprise and consumer broadband connections and the need for more backhaul capacity to satisfy the needs of an ever-growing number of 3G and eventually 4G devices, the need for speed is real and consumers and businesses are paying for it.

The new iPad 3G I just picked up with its corresponding $30/month connection should be a reminder to the skeptics of the insatiable desire for bandwidth on-the-go.

For years, the tech industry tried to kill Ethernet with newer and more innovative technologies but Ethernet kept evolving to meet and exceed the challenge. In fact now the replacement of T1s and T3s with Ethernet is common. Although not exactly analogous, I always think of WiFi as similar to Ethernet in that it continues to evolve to take on technologies such as WiMAX, LTE and other next generation networks.

Certainly anyone who has used a municipal WIFi solution which works well knows you can somewhat replace cellular providers in this manner.

We have spent a considerable amount of time rearchitecting the TMC video site to be more friendly with Apple products which don't support Flash. Our solution has a few parts and for those of you who like video, here are some options. On an iPhone/iPod you can just go to i.tmcnet.com where you will be presented with a video option showing some of our more recently recorded videos as well as recent stories. We have an iPad 3G on order and will test this site out on the device when Apple releases it.

Greenpeace has recently decided that going after oil drillers and coal miners is not enough and they plan to focus on companies they believe to be polluting by expanding their efforts into the data center market. More specifically the company recently chose to go after Apple and Facebook because of where they decided to locate their data centers. Greenpeace it seems prefers to have data centers located where there is less coal involved in energy production.

Last month I spent some time discussing how social networking will impact your company on search engines. In this issue, it is worth discussing how these technologies are changing marketing, media and sales.

You have to give Google credit; they seem to want to make the world a better place by opening up the world and making technology and services more accessible. And they are powerful enough to make it all happen - search revenue pours in and is being allocated to services which compete with Amazon and Microsoft among others. In the mobile phone space they go up against Palm, RIM, Nokia and Microsoft.

Yesterday they announced a new social networking initiative called Buzz which is supposed to unseat Facebook and twitter.